The Moors Last Sigh

watching, watching; but when her pioneering work spawned followers, when other young artists began to act as public recorders and even began calling themselves the ‘Chipkalist Movement’, then, characteristically, my mother publicly disowned her disciples. In a newspaper article entitled ‘I Am The Lizard’ she admitted her authorship, defying the British to move against her (they did not) and dismissing her imitators as ‘cartoonists and photographers’.
    ‘The grand manner is all very well,’ my father, reminiscing, commented in his old age. ‘But it makes for a lonely life.’

    When Aurora Zogoiby heard that the Naval Strike Committee had been persuaded by the Congress leadership to call off the stoppage, and that it had convoked a meeting of the sailors to order them back to their posts, her disappointment with the world as it was burst its banks. Without thinking, without waiting for her driver Hanuman, she leapt into the curtained Buick and took off for the naval base. By the time she reached the Afghan Church in the Colaba Cantonment, however, the bubble of her invulnerability had burst, and she was beginning to have second thoughts about the wisdom of her journey. The road to the base was thick with defeated sailors, frustrated young men in clean uniforms and filthy moods, young men swirling listlessly like fallen leaves. Crows jeered in a plane-tree; a sailor picked up a stone and hurled it in the direction of the noise. Black forms fluttered contemptuously, circled, settled down, resumed their taunts. Police officers in short trousers muttered anxiously in small knots, like children afraid of punishment, and even my mother began to see that this was no place for a lady with a sketchbook and folding stool, let alone a gleaming Buick without so much as the protective presence of a chauffeur. It was a hot, humid, ill-tempered afternoon. A child’s lilac kite, its string cut in some other lost battle, fell pathetically from the sky.
    Aurora did not need to lower her window to ask what was on the sailors’ minds, because she was thinking the same things – that the Congress were acting like chamchas, toadies; that even now, when the British were too unsure of the army to send it in against the sailors, they could be sure that Congresswallahs would spare them the trouble of having to do so. When the masses actually do rise up, she thought, the bosses turn tail. Brown bosses, white bosses, it was the same thing. ‘This strike has scare-o’ed our lot as much as theirs.’ Aurora, too, was in a mutinous mood; but she was not a sailor, and knew that to those angry boys she would look like a rich bitch in a fancy car – as, perhaps, the enemy.
    The sullen, aimless thickening of the crowd had forced her to slow the Buick to walking pace, and when, with a gesture whose swift casualness concealed a frightening strength, one scowling young giant twisted the chrome housing of the Buick’s wing-mirror until it hung uselessly off the car like a broken limb, she felt her heart begin to pound, and decided it was time to leave. Unable to turn round, she put the car into reverse; and realised, as she pushed the accelerator, that without the wing-mirror she was unable to check her rear on account of the intervening presence of green-and-gold cloth; that some sailors, in a final show of defiance, had suddenly decided to sit down in the road; and that, thanks to her growing, thumping feeling of alarm, she had accelerated harder than she intended, and was going much, much too fast.
    As she braked, she felt a small bump.
    Stories of Aurora Zogoiby being gripped by panic are rare, but this is one such tale: feeling the bump, my horrified mother, who had at once understood that someone had been staging a sit-down protest behind her car, column-shifted the Buick into first. The car leapt forward a few feet, thus passing bumpily over the stricken sailor’s outstretched leg for a second time. At this moment several policemen, waving sticks and blowing whistles, raced towards the Buick, and Aurora, acting now in a kind of dream, motivated by some disoriented notion of guilt and escape, jerked the car into reverse once more. There was a third bump, although this time it was less noticeable than on the previous occasions. Shouts of rage mounted behind her, and, completely unhinged by the situation, she lurched forward again in a wild response to the cries – barely feeling the fourth bump – and knocked at least one